Customers don't want 3D because they don't want to spend the $$$ replacing their VHS libraries with DVDs then "directors cut" DVDs then "collectors edition" DVDs then Blurays then "3D".
Yahoo resets your junk mail preferences without telling you, which promptly floods your email account with spam. GMail doesn't.
Yahoo wants you cell phone number with no opt out just to create an account. GMail at least allows you a "no thanks that is private information" option.
Yahoo promises never to send you spam if you opt out. This is a bald face lie. I know this because when Yahoo! demanded a backup email addy I specified an alt email addy that is used for nothing else (I never gave that addy to anyone else) and that account got spammed. Armed with this info, they were never going to get my cell phone number because they would spam it.
Yahoo isn't an email provider, they are telemarketers with deceptive practices.
Seriously, I didn't know people still used Yahoo anymore than AOL.
Macrovision (author of the copy protection system we all love) has a similar approach. In addition to patenting the protection scheme, they patent any alternate scheme or any circumvention scheme they can think of. They have used them to squash circumvention devices (such as DVD Decrypter) out of the market.
So why are the new robber barons allowed to get away with such abusive, anti-competitive actions?
Because the Clinton-era DoJ wardogs who brought the antitrust action against MS were removed when the Bush Administration took office and the new DoJ settled the case for peanuts. Today's DoJ under Obama seem to be focused on protecting Hollywood's copyrights and are turning a blind eye to antitrust.
Antitrust enforcement actions depend largely on the administration in the White House. When Teddy Roosevelt was in office his DoJ wardogs enforced the Sherman Act with a vengeance.
The US system is not designed for high speed passenger transit, but it works great for moving freight.
The impetus behind the rail builders of the 1800s was freight transit, not passenger transit.
Moving passengers by rail was only profitable because a) horse and carriage was the only other transportation b) labor costs were low c) property taxes on RR station real estate was low d) cost of maintaining large stations was low e) the US postal service contract with the railroads buffeted passenger transit costs and f) there was no decent interstate roadway system. First the automobile became the preferred mode of transportation. Then unions drove up labor costs. Then property taxes and maintainance costs went up. Then the US postal service cancelled the RR contract in favor of trucks on interstates built with federal subsidies.
Passenger transit became a huge drain on railroad revenue thanks to the (now defunct) federal regulatory body ICC that mandated operation of oft-empty passenger trains. The railroads finally dropped passenger services en masses and Congress created AmTrak to operate the remaining passenger trains. Amtrak has had a shaky history of profitability and operations as they operate on private freight tracks and have to submit to freight train schedules.
Over 100 years ago, many railroads were tightwads and wouldn't issue new lanterns to conductors and brakemen to replace their aging ones. They finally would ditch their lanterns over a river bridge as they approached the yard limits, then report the lanterns as missing to the yardmaster who would issue them a new lantern.
So this husband forgot Valentine Day and the wife was furious.
She told him in no uncertain terms that tomorrow morning she expected a gift in the driveway that goes from zero to 200 in less than ten seconds - AND IT BETTER BE THERE.
Next morning the husband leaves early. Later the wife awakes and looks out the window to spot a small gift-wrapped box in the driveway. So she puts on a robe and brings the box in the house to open it.
Years ago I got an Alesis Nanocompressor for my parents and installed it inline between the audio outputs of the cable box and the TV. Now the blasted commercials bother them no more.
Cost: $50 used plus some audio adapter cables.
Yes I know some TVs have built in compressors. Guess what, they don't work worth a damn.
Commercials are what drove me to dump cable/broadcast TV forever... not just the volume but the increasing ratio of ads to program per hour. Way too many commercials and they're even showing them in sidebars during the program. I ceased watching TV since 2000 and I do not miss it.
If the government wants to help, they can mandate decent quality compressors in new TVs that are enabled by default. It won't cost any more than those V-chips or the digital TV receivers.
The FCC has been hearing for DECADES about obnoxiously loud commercials, and now they want to help...?
What is Dr. Seuss wrote Technical Training Manuals?
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the buss is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!
You can't say this?
What a shame sir!
We'll find you
another game sir.
If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
But your packets want to tunnel down another protocol,
That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effect of gauss
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!
When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,
And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc,
Then your have to flash your memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM.
Quickly turn off your computer and be sure to tell your mom!
Just curious: do you align yourself with the camp that feels that violent video games and movies should be outlawed because they (in a certain few's opinions) "encourage immoral behaviour" as well ?
Thank you for that gross misjudgement.
To answer that, no I do not agree with outlawing movies. That's why we have the MPAA rating system. I do not agree with outlawing violent games but we badly need a ratings system for them.
Anybody who denies that violent behavior directly affects society has forgotten the Beavis and Butthead episode - never re-aired and quietly swept under the rug - that inspired a child viewer to set his trailer afire and his family lost an infant daughter in the fire. And that's just one media "entertainment" that has been quietly swept under the rug, there are more.
Under that reasoning then thieves, bank robbers, and murderers would escape the law. It is immoral to steal and immoral to kill. Whether you like it or not, courts deal with morals. Live with it.
One thing I never understood, why is prostitution (paying someone to have sex with you) illegal but making pr0n (paying someone to have sex with you or another person in front of a camera) is legal?
First off, it is not "sex" it is "fornication". The media has done a deceptive job of greying the issue and justifying immoral actions by replacing "fornication" with "sex". They deceived the law enforcement and kept it from being a crime.
Fornication is highly discouraged in Holy Scripture. It says don't do it, period. After all the fallout from the "sex revolution", the wisdom of this scripture is too true.
Second, pr0n teaches nothing about how to maintain a relationship. Zero, nada, zip. The physical aspect glorified by pr0n is not even 1% of what you need to know about maintaining a relationship. Not to mention that it encourages immoral behavior like adultery, whoremongery, and fornication. Yes there is scripture that discourages pr0n, but I am refraining from using the search while at work.
I'm sick of the dysfunctional NYS gov't and their high taxes. I work in NYS but a neighboring state is less than fifteen miles from work. When I save enough $$$ to buy a house - at my age which will be the house I retire in - I will NOT be buying in NYS. The neighboring state does not tax retirement income, NYS does. Everything is significantly cheaper there.
NYS has sent their thugs to malls in bordering states to pressure shoppers bearing NYS license plates to shop in NYS. They can take their mafia thuggery and shove it.
NYS has not attracted any new businesses in the LAST FIFTEEN YEARS and citizens are fleeing the state in droves to escape high taxes and are following the jobs leaving the state.
Business groups keep sounding the alarm, but no one in state gov't is listening.
Does anyone know how the CD came to be 5.25" in diameter?
Before the audio CD format was defined, there were data CDs for computers. They used to be stored in a rugged carrier which you inserted in a computer CD drive that fitted in the same slot where the 5-1/4 floppy drive was installed. You inserted the carrier and the drive handled the CD inside the carrier. The carrier protected the surface of the CD from scratches as there was no error correction back then.
I clearly remember seeing these at work and at the school library before audio CDs were around.
Music lovers are leaving FM broadcast radio in droves because of greed.
All the FM stations got bought out by Clearchannel and other conglomerates, and they all play the same songs broadcast from a central location. No more local DJs, no more local news, no more local weather, no more local music.
FM radio puts an emphasis on back catalog - rarely is there any new music that appeals to me. I do not care for hip hop, rap, etc. There is no variety in music, and there is a lot of music out there (esp independent labels) that is not getting played on FM radio.
Payola has pushed the independents out of FM radio. Nobody wants to admit that there is a white elephant in the room. Because the radio conglomerates have gotten greedy, the music variety suffers.
The obesity of advertising - way too much of it - has driven listeners away from FM radio. They are tired of the high ad-to-program ratio of program time. Radio conglomerates got too greedy when they consolidated all the FM stations and then tried to raise revenue through advertising.
The end result is a mass exodus of listeners away from FM radio. Many of my friends no longer listen to radio and they listen to songs on their ipods, their mp3 car radios, their internet radios, etc.
Independent labels found an outlet through internet radio and former FM radio listeners are embracing it enthusiastically. The FM radio lobby is extremely powerful and they conspired to use the royalty fees to drive the internet radio out of the market. That is not how capitalism is supposed to work.
You can thank our patent system for the reason there are no EV cars on the market.
Chevron, a large petroleum company, owns the patent on NiMH battery technology that is critical for EVs.
Toyota produced the RAV4 EV starting in 1997 using NiMH technology. Chevron sued on patent infringement and got Toyota's NiMH production line shut down. Now there are no replacement NiMH batteries anywhere, yet many of the RAV4s are still operating on the original batteries. That's a little known secret that the oil companies tried to suppress.
With fuel costs out of control, there has been growing criticism over oil companies abusing the patent system to prevent competing technologies - technologies that the country badly needs - from ever reaching the market. The founders of the patent system intended the system to protect inventors from having their hard work exploited, not for corporations to maintain their monopoly. Chevron's ligitant tactics prove that they have no intention of producing NiMH batteries in the interest of maintaining their monopoly. They executed patent law in bad faith and a good argument could be made that they should have their NiMH patent revoked.
This is a shining example why our patent system is broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Customers don't want 3D because they don't want to spend the $$$ replacing their VHS libraries with DVDs then "directors cut" DVDs then "collectors edition" DVDs then Blurays then "3D".
You obviously never lived in a rural area where there is no cell phone service and the only possible ISP is satellite.
Yahoo resets your junk mail preferences without telling you, which promptly floods your email account with spam. GMail doesn't.
Yahoo wants you cell phone number with no opt out just to create an account. GMail at least allows you a "no thanks that is private information" option.
Yahoo promises never to send you spam if you opt out. This is a bald face lie. I know this because when Yahoo! demanded a backup email addy I specified an alt email addy that is used for nothing else (I never gave that addy to anyone else) and that account got spammed. Armed with this info, they were never going to get my cell phone number because they would spam it.
Yahoo isn't an email provider, they are telemarketers with deceptive practices.
Seriously, I didn't know people still used Yahoo anymore than AOL.
Macrovision (author of the copy protection system we all love) has a similar approach. In addition to patenting the protection scheme, they patent any alternate scheme or any circumvention scheme they can think of. They have used them to squash circumvention devices (such as DVD Decrypter) out of the market.
Because the Clinton-era DoJ wardogs who brought the antitrust action against MS were removed when the Bush Administration took office and the new DoJ settled the case for peanuts. Today's DoJ under Obama seem to be focused on protecting Hollywood's copyrights and are turning a blind eye to antitrust.
Antitrust enforcement actions depend largely on the administration in the White House. When Teddy Roosevelt was in office his DoJ wardogs enforced the Sherman Act with a vengeance.
I'm not a PSN member, but after the Sony Rootkit Scandal I would be very reluctant with any software offered by Sony.
The impetus behind the rail builders of the 1800s was freight transit, not passenger transit.
Moving passengers by rail was only profitable because a) horse and carriage was the only other transportation b) labor costs were low c) property taxes on RR station real estate was low d) cost of maintaining large stations was low e) the US postal service contract with the railroads buffeted passenger transit costs and f) there was no decent interstate roadway system. First the automobile became the preferred mode of transportation. Then unions drove up labor costs. Then property taxes and maintainance costs went up. Then the US postal service cancelled the RR contract in favor of trucks on interstates built with federal subsidies.
Passenger transit became a huge drain on railroad revenue thanks to the (now defunct) federal regulatory body ICC that mandated operation of oft-empty passenger trains. The railroads finally dropped passenger services en masses and Congress created AmTrak to operate the remaining passenger trains. Amtrak has had a shaky history of profitability and operations as they operate on private freight tracks and have to submit to freight train schedules.
Over 100 years ago, many railroads were tightwads and wouldn't issue new lanterns to conductors and brakemen to replace their aging ones. They finally would ditch their lanterns over a river bridge as they approached the yard limits, then report the lanterns as missing to the yardmaster who would issue them a new lantern.
Wells Fargo has announced the closing of its horse buggy factory
I'll add Leo Stoller Trademark Troll to the list
If the Iranians claim the nuclear facilities are for peaceful purposes, then why is there espionage to pass secrets to the west...?
and offer their iPad for free
And is there a list of these donating members so I can boycott their products...?
So this husband forgot Valentine Day and the wife was furious.
She told him in no uncertain terms that tomorrow morning she expected a gift in the driveway that goes from zero to 200 in less than ten seconds - AND IT BETTER BE THERE.
Next morning the husband leaves early. Later the wife awakes and looks out the window to spot a small gift-wrapped box in the driveway. So she puts on a robe and brings the box in the house to open it.
And inside is a brand new bathroom scale.
Years ago I got an Alesis Nanocompressor for my parents and installed it inline between the audio outputs of the cable box and the TV. Now the blasted commercials bother them no more.
Cost: $50 used plus some audio adapter cables.
Yes I know some TVs have built in compressors. Guess what, they don't work worth a damn.
Commercials are what drove me to dump cable/broadcast TV forever... not just the volume but the increasing ratio of ads to program per hour. Way too many commercials and they're even showing them in sidebars during the program. I ceased watching TV since 2000 and I do not miss it.
If the government wants to help, they can mandate decent quality compressors in new TVs that are enabled by default. It won't cost any more than those V-chips or the digital TV receivers.
The FCC has been hearing for DECADES about obnoxiously loud commercials, and now they want to help...?
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the buss is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!
You can't say this?
What a shame sir!
We'll find you
another game sir.
If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
But your packets want to tunnel down another protocol,
That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effect of gauss
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!
When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,
And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc,
Then your have to flash your memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM.
Quickly turn off your computer and be sure to tell your mom!
"Thou shalt not kill"
Thank you for that gross misjudgement.
To answer that, no I do not agree with outlawing movies. That's why we have the MPAA rating system. I do not agree with outlawing violent games but we badly need a ratings system for them.
Anybody who denies that violent behavior directly affects society has forgotten the Beavis and Butthead episode - never re-aired and quietly swept under the rug - that inspired a child viewer to set his trailer afire and his family lost an infant daughter in the fire. And that's just one media "entertainment" that has been quietly swept under the rug, there are more.
Under that reasoning then thieves, bank robbers, and murderers would escape the law. It is immoral to steal and immoral to kill. Whether you like it or not, courts deal with morals. Live with it.
First off, it is not "sex" it is "fornication". The media has done a deceptive job of greying the issue and justifying immoral actions by replacing "fornication" with "sex". They deceived the law enforcement and kept it from being a crime.
Fornication is highly discouraged in Holy Scripture. It says don't do it, period. After all the fallout from the "sex revolution", the wisdom of this scripture is too true.
Second, pr0n teaches nothing about how to maintain a relationship. Zero, nada, zip. The physical aspect glorified by pr0n is not even 1% of what you need to know about maintaining a relationship. Not to mention that it encourages immoral behavior like adultery, whoremongery, and fornication. Yes there is scripture that discourages pr0n, but I am refraining from using the search while at work.
...that an industry that promotes immoral behavior seeks redress in a court that is grounded in morals.
NYS has sent their thugs to malls in bordering states to pressure shoppers bearing NYS license plates to shop in NYS. They can take their mafia thuggery and shove it.
NYS has not attracted any new businesses in the LAST FIFTEEN YEARS and citizens are fleeing the state in droves to escape high taxes and are following the jobs leaving the state.
Business groups keep sounding the alarm, but no one in state gov't is listening.
Before the audio CD format was defined, there were data CDs for computers. They used to be stored in a rugged carrier which you inserted in a computer CD drive that fitted in the same slot where the 5-1/4 floppy drive was installed. You inserted the carrier and the drive handled the CD inside the carrier. The carrier protected the surface of the CD from scratches as there was no error correction back then.
I clearly remember seeing these at work and at the school library before audio CDs were around.
I tried googling for an image, no luck here.
All the FM stations got bought out by Clearchannel and other conglomerates, and they all play the same songs broadcast from a central location. No more local DJs, no more local news, no more local weather, no more local music.
FM radio puts an emphasis on back catalog - rarely is there any new music that appeals to me. I do not care for hip hop, rap, etc. There is no variety in music, and there is a lot of music out there (esp independent labels) that is not getting played on FM radio.
Payola has pushed the independents out of FM radio. Nobody wants to admit that there is a white elephant in the room. Because the radio conglomerates have gotten greedy, the music variety suffers.
The obesity of advertising - way too much of it - has driven listeners away from FM radio. They are tired of the high ad-to-program ratio of program time. Radio conglomerates got too greedy when they consolidated all the FM stations and then tried to raise revenue through advertising.
The end result is a mass exodus of listeners away from FM radio. Many of my friends no longer listen to radio and they listen to songs on their ipods, their mp3 car radios, their internet radios, etc.
Independent labels found an outlet through internet radio and former FM radio listeners are embracing it enthusiastically. The FM radio lobby is extremely powerful and they conspired to use the royalty fees to drive the internet radio out of the market. That is not how capitalism is supposed to work.
Chevron, a large petroleum company, owns the patent on NiMH battery technology that is critical for EVs.
Toyota produced the RAV4 EV starting in 1997 using NiMH technology. Chevron sued on patent infringement and got Toyota's NiMH production line shut down. Now there are no replacement NiMH batteries anywhere, yet many of the RAV4s are still operating on the original batteries. That's a little known secret that the oil companies tried to suppress.
With fuel costs out of control, there has been growing criticism over oil companies abusing the patent system to prevent competing technologies - technologies that the country badly needs - from ever reaching the market. The founders of the patent system intended the system to protect inventors from having their hard work exploited, not for corporations to maintain their monopoly. Chevron's ligitant tactics prove that they have no intention of producing NiMH batteries in the interest of maintaining their monopoly. They executed patent law in bad faith and a good argument could be made that they should have their NiMH patent revoked.
This is a shining example why our patent system is broken.